I always loved to watch the Bible-thumpers on late-Sunday-night TV in those days. Look at this, I'd say to the kids. This is better than any circus. Their fiery eyes and passionate performances fascinated me no end.

And then one week the wan but convincing blond Pentecostal David Paul came to the fairgrounds from St. Louis to preach for two days and collect enough money to pay his Sunday-night rent at Channel 12. So I had to go.

The scene was like Elmer Gantry meets low-rent American Fellini. A huge dismal old auditorium, mostly empty. At one side on a small portable stage Brother Harold played a lightweight portable organ and Brother Don played a cheap set of drums and they sang gospel songs for an hour before Reverend Paul came out to preach. I wish I could remember what they looked or sounded like. Brother Harold's wife's sister sold cassette tapes of his music from a card table. Forty or 50 quiet sad-looking people sat in rows on metal folding chairs, all women except for a couple of Mexican men who were there with their families. The women--obese, or old, or bony, or lonely, or in groups, red-haired women with white roots and white-haired women with black roots.

When it was time to give money I went up to where the Reverend with his wife and child stood holding the plastic wastebasket, even though I didn't have any money, just so I could shake hands with him. I put my nothing in the basket and he took my hand in both his soft slender hands and shook it hard and put his face up close to mine and looked right through my eyes into my mind and whispered Bless you! so hard, like he was pleading with God to bless me. Afterward my hand tingled. It smelled of men's cologne all evening while he preached.

When it was time, I stood up with all those who needed spiritual or mental healing and he healed us together from a distance.

And then I went up for the hands-on. A dozen of us stood shoulder to shoulder and David Paul went down the line, speaking and shouting in tongues, with his man behind us--Brother Don, that would be--to help anyone who might be overwhelmed by the laying on of hands. Those of us in the line kept our eyes tightly closed, and we rocked a little with the rhythm of the Reverend's glossolalia. When he got to me he gripped the top of my head hard with one hand and shouted HEAL!, and a violent jolt of electricity passed from the top of my head down through me and out my feet into the floor. It knocked the wind right out of me, and I vibrated, and I went back a little and could feel Brother Don's hand supporting me; my knees wanted to cave in, and it was all I could do to stand there while Reverend Paul finished up with the others. I stood shakily in the line holding hands with a very small very white elderly woman named Mary on my left and a very fat very lovely young housewife in a flowered dress on my right. Later, when we were back in our chairs, Brother Harold began to pray, and everyone closed their eyes for the prayer, and while we stood there with our eyes closed David Paul and his petite blonde wife and their handsome blond baby slipped out silently and were gone.

In the parking lot I sat in my car in the dark and shook and shook until I thought I could drive home. Halfway home I pulled over and shook some more, and then a great calm descended on me and I felt good then and drove the rest of the way with no problem.

Two days later I came down with encephalitis--a brain inflammation--no one could guess the source of (it was February or March, still pretty cold, and there weren't any mosquitoes out yet). I was ill and in great pain for two weeks. I joked feebly that it was the wages of my insincerity, of abusing spiritual privileges, of seeking to be healed just to see what it felt like, just so I could write about it 18 years later in a blog or something.
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